With development of mobile Internet technologies, and in particular, with the emerging and popularization of intelligent terminals, such as mobile phones and tablet computers, an increasing quantity of users directly use these terminals to access a network. In addition, with rapid development of operating systems and hardware performance of terminals, a large quantity of software previously used on a computer may be used on intelligent, miniaturized, and mobile terminals, and in particular, social software is frequently used. Such software is generally instant messaging software, and a connection between the software and a network is characterized by being abrupt and timed. A piece of instant messaging software is used as an example. The software sends a heartbeat packet on an operating system of a terminal every two minutes, so that the terminal periodically notifies a server of a state of the terminal. For this purpose, a network controller needs to transmit tens of network signaling messages, such as access signaling and bearer setup signaling, and after transmission is completed, the network controller releases an air interface resource after 7-15 seconds. In one month, even if a user using the instant messaging software does not perform any operation, 22320 heartbeat packets are sent, which is equivalent to consuming a signaling processing capability of sending 22320 SMS messages, or equivalent to a signaling processing capability of making more than 10000 calls, with only 1.83 megabytes of traffic generated.
It can be learned that when a terminal uses instant messaging software, the terminal generates a large amount of network signaling to maintain a connection to a server, and the generated signaling is intended only to perform transmission of a few bytes. In a severe case, the signaling may cause interference to a normal service of a network. In addition, when a future development prospect of a network is considered, a large quantity of terminals are to be connected to the network, and similar to sending an instant message, many terminals discontinuously send data of little content and a small length to the network, and as terminals increase, a large quantity of network signaling resources are consumed.